Transportation Chief Warns Against Transit Subsidy Cuts

By RICHARD PEREZ-PENA

Published: May 18, 1995

Republican budget proposals would slowly cripple mass transit in and around New York by slashing money for maintenance and modernization, Transportation Secretary Federico F. Pena said yesterday.

The resolutions passed last week by the House and Senate Budget Committees, which would cut spending on transportation by 13 to 22 percent over five years, reflect "a Republican philosophy of saying that transit is not important to our country," Mr. Pena said in an interview.

Both resolutions recommend eliminating $770 million a year in mass transit operating subsidies and the $320 million-a-year Amtrak subsidy, and the House version says the $4.5 billion the Government spends each year on mass transit capital projects should be eliminated, as well.

The loss of operating funds would cause transit agencies around the country to raise fares, force some smaller agencies to fold and threaten Amtrak's survival, Mr. Pena said.

Most important to New York City and its near neighbors, he said the loss of capital funds would kill or defer for years projects like a Queens subway tunnel and new commuter rail links in New Jersey, and would force transit agencies to delay basic maintenance and the purchase of new trains and buses.

"The result will be that the basic structures, the buses, the trains, the infrastructure of the system, would begin to deteriorate," he said in an interview. "You'd get back to the days of 20 years ago, when the infrastructure fell into very bad shape."

But Representative Susan Molinari, Republican of Staten Island, accused President Clinton and his Cabinet of playing Chicken Little. The Republican cuts are deep, she said, but they are manageable and necessary. "This is just another attempt by someone in the Administration to make noise instead of coming up with their own proposals to balance the budget," she said.

Mr. Pena's predictions marked one of the first volleys in the Clinton Administration's bid to take the budget battle to the local level. He will hold a news conference today at Pennsylvania Station, in the first of several visits to cities around the country to decry the local effects of the Congressional budget proposals.

His gloomy predictions came a day after E. Virgil Conway, the newly confirmed chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, warned that the agency may have to raise fares by year's end. The city and the state have cut support for the authority, and the city is threatening more cuts.

At its current rate, the Federal Department of Transportation would spend $212 billion over the next five years. The House budget resolution would cut the figure to $184 billion -- a 13 percent reduction -- and the Senate resolution would cut it to $165 billion -- a 22 percent cut. Each resolution includes nonbinding suggestions for reaching the target figures.

One of the most immediate consequences of the proposals, Mr. Pena said, would fall on Amtrak. The Senate resolution recommends an immediate end to the subsidy for Amtrak operations, which is $320 million this year, while the House version would phase it out over seven years. The national railroad carries more than half of its 22 million passengers in the corridor from Washington to Boston.

"They would basically drive Amtrak into bankruptcy," Mr. Pena said.

But Ms. Molinari, chairwoman of the transportation subcommittee on Amtrak, said that a smaller, self-sufficient national rail service would emerge in a few years. She said that while many lightly used routes would be eliminated, service in the Northeast would not decline.

The M.T.A., which includes New York City's subways and buses, the Long Island Rail Road, the Metro-North Railroad and Long Island Bus in Nassau County, spends nearly $2 billion a year on capital projects, one-third of it coming from the Federal Government.

Over the next few years, that money was slated for completing the Q line subway connection to Queens Plaza, buying the first new subway trains in a decade, renovating dozens of subway stations and replacing buses and other equipment.

New Jersey Transit's capital plans include linking several rail lines at Secaucus, extending commuter rails into outlying areas, buying new buses and trains and building a light rail line along the Hudson River.